Sunday, November 6, 2011

More weight savings- the old fashioned way...

Replacing gear with lighter gear is both expensive and doesn't work for everything. Especially when there is no equivalent that was ever intended to be light and packable. This is where it's nice to have a CNC machine and a lathe on hand:

I attacked my poor star tracker again; this time with the above tools. I cut sections out, lathed down the worm gear center, shaved whole sections off, and even hollowed out the heavy elevation studs. Total I managed to cut another 155 grams out of the assembly, or 0.34lbs. There will be more coming out when I change out the tracking assembly for one of my own design, but for now this is no longer the heaviest thing in my pack. That might be more of a mental win than anything. Actually it now weighs less than my sleeping bag. Oh, and it looks much cooler too:

(tracking motor not attached in this particular photo, but accounted for in weight)